Most press releases written by store owners get deleted in under two seconds. Not rejected, not read and passed over. Deleted from a preview pane, in a batch, alongside forty others, by somebody who has three deadlines today and has never heard of your store.
That is the audience. Once you accept it, writing a press release stops being a creative exercise and becomes a fairly mechanical one. There is a structure that journalists expect, a set of things they ignore, and a short list of situations where an ecommerce store genuinely has news. Most of the work is deciding whether you are in one of those situations, and a lot of the time you are not.
So this guide covers what counts as news for an online store, how to structure the release, how to write a headline and a first paragraph that survive the preview pane, what to put in the boilerplate, and finally how to decide whether to pay for distribution at all. That last section is the one I would read first, because for a good number of stores the honest answer is do not spend the money.
Start here: does your store actually have news
News is something that changed, that a stranger has a reason to care about, and that they could not have found out any other way. Three tests, all three have to pass. Almost everything a small store wants to announce fails at least one.
| What store owners want to announce | Does it pass | Why |
| New product colour or variant | No | Nothing changed for anyone outside your customer list |
| Website redesign | No | Every store does this and nobody outside the company notices |
| A sale or discount period | Almost never | Deals coverage is a different beat and is usually pitched, not wired |
| First product in a category nobody else stocks | Sometimes | Only if the category itself is interesting to somebody’s readers |
| Exclusive distribution agreement with a manufacturer | Yes | A real change in who can buy what, and where |
| A funding round, acquisition or merger | Yes | Business press covers ownership changes as a matter of routine |
| Original data from your own sales or survey | Yes | You are the only source, which is the strongest position there is |
| A recall, safety issue or regulatory matter | Yes | Genuinely consequential to readers, and often required anyway |
| Opening a physical location or a new market | Sometimes | Local and trade press care more than national press does |
| An award or certification from a recognised body | Sometimes | Depends entirely on whether the body means anything |
The row worth staring at is the data one. An ecommerce store sits on numbers nobody else has. What percentage of customers in your category buy on a phone at eleven at night. How average order value moved across a season. What the return rate is for a product type everyone assumes is safe. That is original reporting, you are the only source for it, and it is by far the most reliable way a small store gets written about.
If none of the rows above describe your situation, stop reading the writing section and skip to the last part of this guide, where I explain how to decide about distribution. You will save yourself a few hundred dollars.
The structure, in the order it has to appear
Press release structure is not a style choice. It exists because editors read top down and stop whenever they have enough. Everything essential goes first, and every paragraph after that is optional detail. That shape is called the inverted pyramid and there is no clever alternative.
| Element | Length | Job it does |
| Headline | Roughly 10 to 12 words | Says what happened, in the words a stranger would use |
| Dateline | One line | City, state and date, so the release can be placed and filed |
| Lead paragraph | Under 40 words | Who did what, when, where and why it matters |
| Second paragraph | Two to three sentences | The specific detail that proves the lead is true |
| Quote | Two to three sentences | A human explaining significance, not repeating facts |
| Supporting detail | Two or three paragraphs | Numbers, availability, context, anything a reporter would ask |
| Boilerplate | Roughly 60 to 80 words | Who the company is, in the third person |
| Media contact | Three lines | A name, an email and a phone number that a person answers |
Add up the middle of those ranges and you land somewhere around 400 to 500 words, which is not a coincidence. That is the length the distribution packages are built around, and it is also the length past which nobody is still reading. If your release wants to be 900 words, the problem is almost never that the news is too big.
The headline, which is most of the job
Your headline gets read in a list. It sits next to forty others in an inbox or a wire feed, in plain text, with no formatting to help it. It has one job: make the situation clear enough that somebody can decide in a second whether it is theirs.
Write it as a plain declarative sentence in the present tense. Name the company, name the action, name the object. Skip the adjectives. Nobody has ever been persuaded by the word innovative and every reporter has a filter for the word revolutionary that runs before their eyes do.
| Weak headline | What is wrong | Stronger version |
| Leading Retailer Announces Exciting New Product Line | No company, no product, no news | Northfield Outfitters Adds Winter Range From Norwegian Maker Vaeret |
| Revolutionary Store Transforms Online Shopping | Claims without content | Northfield Outfitters Reports 41 Percent of Orders Now Placed After 10pm |
| We Are Excited To Announce Our Partnership | First person, no names, no substance | Vaeret Names Northfield Outfitters Its Exclusive United States Retailer |
The right hand column works because in every case a stranger can tell what happened without opening anything. Notice also that the strongest of the three is the data one, because it is the only one where the store is the source rather than the subject.
The lead paragraph, where releases usually die
The lead has to survive on its own. Assume the headline was the only thing read and this paragraph is the second and last chance. Under forty words, and it should answer who, what, when, where and why anybody should care.
A working example. Northfield Outfitters, an online retailer of cold weather gear, has been named the exclusive United States retailer for Norwegian manufacturer Vaeret, making its insulated shell jackets available to American buyers for the first time since 2019.
That is thirty six words and it contains the entire story. Everything after it is elaboration. If a reporter stops there, they still know enough to decide whether to reply.
The most common failure is opening with context. “Founded in 2018, Northfield Outfitters has grown steadily and is proud to announce” wastes the only two lines you get on facts nobody asked for. Company history goes in the boilerplate at the bottom, which is exactly what the boilerplate is for.
Write it first, then decide what it costs
eReleases packages run 400, 500 and 600 words at $399, $499 and $699 with national Cision PR Newswire distribution. Extra words cost $150 per 100 word block, so a finished draft is what tells you which tier you need. No distributor guarantees any coverage.
The quote, and why most of them are worthless
Almost every quote in almost every press release is deleted before publication, because almost every quote restates the facts in the paragraph above it with the word delighted added. A quote earns its place only when it says something that cannot be said in the reporting voice.
That means opinion, judgement, or explanation of significance. Why this matters. What it was like. What happens next. A founder saying we are thrilled to expand our offering is not a quote, it is a formality. A founder saying we could not source a jacket rated below minus twenty degrees anywhere in the country, which is why every serious buyer was importing them privately, is a quote, because it explains why anyone should care.
One quote is enough for a store announcement. Two is acceptable if the second comes from the other party in a partnership. Three means nobody was willing to cut anything, and a reporter will notice.
The boilerplate, written once and reused forever
The boilerplate is the paragraph at the bottom that describes the company. Write it once, keep it to roughly sixty to eighty words, and stop rewriting it for every release. It exists so that an editor can describe you accurately in one line without calling you.
It needs four things: what you sell, who you sell it to, something specific that makes the sentence concrete, and where you are based. Founded in 2018 and based in Portland, Northfield Outfitters is an online retailer of cold weather clothing and equipment for backcountry use, stocking technical outerwear from twelve European manufacturers and shipping to customers across North America. That is fifty two words and it does the whole job.
What it does not need is your mission, your values, your commitment to excellence, or the phrase leading provider. Every one of those is a claim nobody will check and nobody will print.
What journalists ignore, in descending order
| Thing | Why it gets ignored |
| Superlatives without a source | Leading, premier, best in class and world class are unverifiable, so they read as filler |
| First person plural | A release is written in the third person, and we signals marketing copy rather than news |
| Exclamation marks | They appear in the reject pile at a rate that is genuinely remarkable |
| Attachments nobody asked for | Large files trip filters, link to a media folder instead |
| A quote that repeats the lead | It gets deleted, which shortens your release by a fifth for no benefit |
| Vague timing | Coming soon and in the near future cannot be printed, give a date |
| No contact details | A reporter with a question and no number moves to the next release |
| A headline in title case with every word capitalised | It reads as a marketing asset rather than a news item in a feed |
Fix the last one on that list before anything else. A working phone number and an email somebody actually monitors is the difference between a reporter asking a follow up question and a reporter writing about somebody else. It costs nothing and a surprising number of releases go out without one.
A checklist for the hour before you send
Read the release out loud. If you run out of breath in a sentence, that sentence is too long. If you are bored by paragraph three, so is everyone else.
Then check the facts a reporter would check first, because those are the ones that end a conversation when they turn out to be wrong. Dates, spellings of every proper noun, the partner company’s legal name, any number you have quoted and where it came from, and the availability date of anything you say is available.
Finally, count the words. Distribution packages are priced by word allowance and going over costs real money. eReleases prices additional words at $150 per 100 word block, so a release that runs 120 words long costs an extra $150 for the sake of about six sentences you probably did not need. Cutting is cheaper than paying, and the writing gets better either way. The full ladder of what costs what is in the eReleases pricing breakdown.
Now the real question: should you pay for distribution at all
This is where most guides stop being useful, because most guides are written by people who sell distribution. So here is the version that assumes you might walk away.
Distribution buys placement on a wire. That is the whole product. Your release goes onto a circuit and becomes available to the outlets, databases and syndication partners that circuit feeds. It does not buy coverage. No distributor promises that a journalist reads it, writes about it, or links to you, and every service in this category is careful never to promise that, because they cannot.
So the question is not whether distribution works. It is whether placement on a wire is worth the money for your specific announcement. Three situations where it clearly is, and one where it clearly is not.
It is worth paying when somebody specific expects to see the release on a wire. Investors, retail buyers, distributors and some compliance processes all treat a wire release as the way announcements are made, and in that case you are buying a formality that has genuine value.
It is worth paying when you have original data and you want it to be findable and citable later. A wire release creates a dated, syndicated record that people can point at, which is exactly what data deserves.
It is worth paying when the announcement is genuinely of interest to a trade beat and you want it in front of that beat efficiently, rather than emailing forty people individually.
It is not worth paying when the honest reason you are buying is hope. If the plan is to send a release about a new product line and see what happens, what happens is nothing, and you will have spent between $66.60 and $699 finding that out. That is the single most common mistake in this category and it has nothing to do with which service you picked.
Have a reason before you have an invoice
eReleases starts at $399 a release for national Cision PR Newswire distribution, with a stated 30 percent discount for first time customers. Placement on that wire is the product being sold. Whether anybody writes about you is not, and no service promises it.
If you decide to pay, what the money actually buys
The prices below came off each vendor’s own pricing page on 8 September 2026. Nothing here is a test result and no account was opened.
| Service | Entry price | Cheapest per release | Underlying distribution |
| PRWeb | $120 per release | $120 | Cision, with PR Newswire syndication from the $245 tier |
| EIN Presswire | $149 per release | $66.60 on the 15 release bundle | Its own network, AP News, Nexstar Media Group and the USA TODAY Network |
| eReleases | $399 per release | Not published, bulk pricing starts at two releases | National Cision PR Newswire |
Two notes that matter for a store owner. The EIN Presswire bundles are annual, and EIN states that press releases may be issued within one year from the date of purchase, so $66.60 is only the real price if you send all fifteen inside the year. And eReleases is a reseller of the national Cision PR Newswire circuit rather than the wire itself, which is why a cheaper Cision option exists in the same table. Those two routes are compared tier by tier in the eReleases versus PRWeb comparison.
If you want the full ranking with every tier costed and grouped by circuit, that is in the ranking of press release distribution services. If you already have a service in mind and just want the reasons people switch away from it, those are laid out by motive in the eReleases alternatives breakdown.
Do you need somebody else to write it
eReleases prices a press release writing service at $300 per release on top of the package. That is a fair price for professional copy and it removes a real obstacle for people who freeze in front of a blank document.
It is also, for most store owners, avoidable. The structure in this guide is not difficult and a first draft of a 450 word release takes about ninety minutes once you know what goes where. If you write your own product descriptions, you can write this.
One clarification, because it is misreported everywhere. eReleases says it will not distribute your release until you are satisfied with it. That is a satisfaction guarantee covering the copy the writing service produces. It is not a money back guarantee on distribution and it is not a guarantee about outcomes. Anyone describing it as a refund promise has not read the terms. The long form assessment of the service is in the full eReleases review.
What to do instead, when the answer is do not buy
Publish the announcement on your own site with a date on it. Send it directly to the small number of people who genuinely care, by name, in a short email that says what happened in the first line. That is not a consolation prize; for a store with a real customer list it frequently outperforms a wire send, because those people already know who you are.
Then spend the money on something that keeps working after the news cycle ends. Organic search compounds and a wire send does not, and the honest version of that argument is in the guide to ecommerce SEO strategies for free organic traffic.
And keep the draft. The discipline of writing a release forces you to state plainly what changed and why anyone should care, which is a useful exercise even when the answer turns out to be that nobody should.
When the news is real, price the send properly
eReleases lists $399 for 400 words and one industry target list, $499 for 500 words and two, and $699 for 600 words and three, all on national Cision PR Newswire. Add ons are priced per release, and coverage is never part of what you are buying.
Running the business behind the store
A press release is a rounding error next to the decisions underneath it. The category you sell in sets the ceiling on everything else, which is why I would start at the high ticket niche list.
If larger order values are unfamiliar ground, read the explanation of high ticket dropshipping first, because exclusive supplier agreements are the kind of thing that actually is news.
Those agreements come from real supplier relationships, and my step by step guide to finding high ticket suppliers covers the approach and the emails that get answered.
Sort the legal entity before you publish anything with a company name on it. The sequence is in the guide to business formation for high ticket dropshipping.
For the storefront itself I use Shopify, because it is where any announcement you make eventually sends people.
To form the company I use Bizee. For business liability cover once orders are moving, I point people at Hiscox.
If you do buy distribution, book it as a dated marketing expense in QuickBooks so that a year later you can see what the whole programme cost you.
If you would rather have the entire operation assembled for you, my team runs a done for you high ticket dropshipping build and launch service.
Frequently asked questions
How long should an ecommerce press release be?
Roughly 400 to 500 words for a standard store announcement. That length fits the structure, matches the word allowances most distribution packages are built around, and sits inside the attention a reporter will give an unsolicited release.
What makes a press release newsworthy for an online store?
Something changed, a stranger has a reason to care, and they could not have found out another way. Exclusive distribution agreements, funding or ownership changes, original data from your own sales, recalls and regulatory matters all qualify. New colours, redesigns and sales almost never do.
Do I need to pay for press release distribution?
Often no. If you cannot name a person or a group who expects to see the release on a wire, publishing it on your own site and emailing the people who care directly does the same job for nothing. Buy distribution when placement itself is the point.
Will a press release get my store backlinks or better rankings?
Do not buy one for that reason. Distribution creates syndicated copies of your announcement, and syndicated copies are syndicated copies. No service in this category promises rankings or links, and treating a wire send as a search tactic is how people end up disappointed.
Should I pay someone to write the press release?
Only if a blank document is genuinely stopping you. eReleases prices a writing service at $300 per release, which is fair, but a 450 word release follows a fixed structure and takes about ninety minutes to draft yourself once you know the shape.
How much does press release distribution cost?
Across the services costed here it runs from $66.60 per release on the EIN Presswire 15 release bundle, which must be used within one year of purchase, up to $699 for the largest eReleases package, with PRWeb entering at $120 and eReleases at $399. Add ons on top are priced per release.
Related Articles
Best Press Release Distribution Services 2026: Ranked by What the Wire Actually Is
eReleases Pricing 2026: The Add On Ladder That Doubles the Headline
eReleases Alternatives 2026: Same Wire, Very Different Prices
eReleases vs EIN Presswire 2026: $399 a Release or $66.60
eReleases Review 2026: The Press Release Distribution Service for Small Businesses
Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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